As I’ve mentioned, I live near the hippy-dippiest grocery store on the planet, which is Whole Foods Palo Alto, the first Whole Foods in the entire state. And, even there, I’ve yet to see a single person buy a Beyond Meat product. So it makes sense to me that the stock BYND looks like it’s ready to head for the grinder.
My neighborhood has long puzzled as to why Marissa Mayer bought the only funeral home left in town. When she did so initially, she suggested she might turn the mortuary into a women’s club. But it has sat there for years, devoid of dead bodies or much of anything else.
Until this morning. I was walking my dogs, as I always do, and the walls of the ex-funeral home were festooned with original art work of honey bears in various kinds of outfits.
The horrific state of global affairs is understandably on my mind, so I’ll kick off the day with this comment cleaner: as a child of the cold war (who, to this day, has nuclear war nightmares, as I did a few nights ago) this map of the Bay Area from 1960s Soviet Russia is chilling. I’ve highlighted Palo Alto:
I’ve made no secret of my fondness for dogs. I grew up with them, and ever since I moved away from my parents as a young person, I’ve had at least one dog (and, more commonly, three) in my life. I’ve written about my experiences with dogs here from time to time on Slope, and the picture on the right is me on Saturday getting to hold a three month old Bernese a friend recently brought into his own family.
This is not a story about the purebred cutie-pie shown here, however. The dog I have in mind was one I saw much earlier in the day, just around sunrise, when I was traipsing around the parking lot of the East Palo Alto Home Depot (AKA not the most elegant place on the planet). I was charging my car up and taking my two larger dogs on their customary morning walk, which at this particular location means examining every single box and bag the find on the ground just in case there are any crusts or tidbits leftover. (There have been occasions when entire pizzas have been found, which to them is like Christmas Day).
As we were walking, I noticed a large dog curled up next to a beat-up old van. I have very good peripheral vision, and an eye for trouble, which always served me well when our kids were very young, so I instantly noticed the dog from a distance. I also noticed he had a tennis ball tucked right next to him, and it was immediately obvious that this tennis ball was the dog’s most treasured asset.
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